As it stands, this investigator, whose job it is to scrutinize government handling of child welfare cases, is funded by, you guessed it, the state agency that supervises child protection work.

That has to change.

Becky Miller Updike told me that during her two-year tenure, her recommendations for improvements in how the state-supervised, county-administered system operates generally were received cordially. But ultimately, they went nowhere.

“I have a hard time believing that all of these recommendations are useless,” she said.

When you think of the number of kids who’ve died in Colorado after having contact with the system, kids who have no one else to protect them from all kinds of horrible abuse and neglect, that description of bureaucratic indifference is infuriating.

Lawmakers created the office of the child protection ombudsman in 2010 in an effort to bring independent review to child abuse and neglect cases. It came on the heels of a high number of deaths of children who had, to one degree or another, contact with the child welfare system.

B.J. Nikkel, a Republican state representative at the time, said she and others very much wanted to have the ombudsman accountable to the legislature. She still supports that.

“The office needs to be totally independent of the administration,” she said.

She was, however, in the political minority and decided in the end that it was better to have the office exist, even if not perfectly situated, than to let the opportunity go by.

“I thought, certainly, it was better to get something created,” she said.

Sen. Linda Newell, D-Littleton, was also involved in creating the office and acknowledges that “best practice” would have the office exist independently of the Colorado Department of Human Services.

“It was not going anywhere,” she said. “We had pushback from everywhere.”

That included objections from the department, the administration and the counties, she told me.

Newell said there are ongoing conversations about what the best structure is, and she’s open to changing it.

If this sounds like just so much bureaucratese, think about the very nature of child protection work. The preservation of privacy for children and families requires confidentiality, and understandably so.

While it is intended to protect those investigated, confidentiality also happens to over cover bureaucrats too. It is a well-known problem in taking on child welfare reform.

But the beauty of the ombudsman position is that this person is privy to the nitty-gritty details of a case and can critique government conduct while protecting individual privacy.

It’s a shame that Updike, who by many accounts was a strong and professional presence in the office, did not have all the tools to really go after what ails child welfare.

Unfortunately, problems with Colorado’s child welfare system have existed through one gubernatorial administration after another despite reform efforts that have merely nibbled at the edges of problems.

Josh Penry, former GOP minority leader of the state Senate, said tolerance for the lack of transformative change should be at an end.

“This has been going on through [Govs.] Owens, Ritter and now Hickenlooper,” he said. “It’s clear that an incremental approach is not working.”

Penry would put the ombudsman in the state attorney general’s office and give the position subpoena power to encourage independence and muscle. “The real power is to shame the system into improving,” he said.

He’s exactly right.

No matter how many internal campaigns there are to be transparent and to encourage best practices, there is nothing as bracing as the unflinching scrutiny of an outsider with no connections to the subject at hand.

Becky Updike is composing a report as she goes out the door that speaks to these sorts of deficiencies. She hopes to see productive change.